John Bellamy Foster - The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift

THE ROBBERY OF NATURE

Capitalism and the Ecological Rift

The Robbery of Nature

John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS

New York

Copyright 2020 by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the publisher.

ISBN 978-158367-839-8 paper

ISBN 978-158367-778-0 cloth

Typeset in Minion Pro and Brown

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK

monthlyreview.org

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Contents

Preface

As long as human beings exist, the history of nature and the history of human beings mutually condition each other.

KARL MARX

THE ROBBERY OF NATURE draws on the classical historicalmaterialist critique associated with Karl Marx and Frederick Engels to explain how capitalist commodity production robs human society and life in general of the conditions of natural and social reproduction, generating a planetary rift that today knows virtually no bounds. The result is an existential crisis in the human relation to the earth that can only be overcome through a long ecological revolution.

In Marxs classical critique of capitalism, human production alters the material form of physical existence, but can do so only in conformity with natural laws and processesif it is not to create an irrevocable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.

In this book, we seek to elaborate on Marxs theory of metabolic rift by employing his notion of the robbery or expropriation of naturewhich, since human beings are inherently a part of nature, is undermining the natural-material bases on which humanitys existence rests.

The expropriation of nature is at one and the same time the expropriation of land/ecology and the expropriation of human bodies themselves. Much of this book is therefore concerned not simply with the robbing of nature but also the robbing of the physical bases of human existence, through various forms of oppression, associated with class, race, gender, and imperialism. In extreme cases, this manifests itself as what Engels called social murder.

We first articulated the notion of the expropriation of nature, around which the present argument revolves, in our article The Paradox of Wealth: Capitalism and Environmental Destruction, appearing in Monthly Review in November 2009, now revised and updated in this book as , The Rift of ire, appears here for the first time.

This book is focused on putting forward a critique of capitalisms catastrophic degradation of the environment. But in the process, we are often compelled to question other left-environmental views that approach these issues in partial, one-sided ways. In doing so, our intention is not to create further divisions within the left, but rather to unite the movement by insisting that the age-old revolutionary principle of the masses, I am nothing and I should be everything, be extended to the world of life itself, merging the calls for substantive equality with ecological sustainability in a universal struggle for sustainable human development. This demands a much deeper and more revolutionary materialism, one that only an ecohistorical materialism can provide.

The multifaceted analysis provided in the following chapters would not have been possible without the help of those with whom we have (between the two of us) written on these topics over the years, including Daniel Auerbach, Kelly Austin, Paul Burkett, Rebecca Clausen, Hannah Holleman, Stefano B. Longo, Fred Magdoff, Brian Napoletano, Pedro Urquijo, Richard York, and Karen Xuan Zhang.

We are also deeply indebted to our colleagues at Monthly Review, including, in addition to Hannah and Fred, Susie Day, R. Jamil Jonna, John Mage, Martin Paddio, Al Ruben, John J. Simon, Intan Suwandi, Camila Valle, Colin Vanderburg, Victor Wallis, and Michael Yates. Ian Angus, editor of Climate and Capitalism, has given us continual support and encouragement.

Our friend Desmond Crooks generously helped in the design of the books cover.

In the process of developing our ideas, we have benefited from interactions with a wide range of thinkers. We would particularly like to acknowledge in this respect Lazarus Adua, Elmar Altvater, Samir Amin, Robert J. Antonio, Shannon Elizabeth Bell, Amanda Bertana, Jordan Besek, Ted Benton, Natalie Blanton, Paul Buhle, Alex Callinicos, Michael Carolan, Matthew Clement, Julia B. Corbett, Michael Dawson, Peter Dickens, Ricardo Dobrovolski, Sue Dockstader, Liam Downey, Adam Driscoll, Wilma Dunaway, Riley Dunlap, Eric Edwards, Martin Empson, Andrew Feenberg, Jared Fitzgerald, Joseph Fracchia, R. Scott Frey, Michael Friedman, Paul Gellert, Martha E. Gimenez, Jennifer Givens, Patrick Greiner, Ryan Gunderson, Gregory Hooks, Leontina Hormel, Alf Hornborg, Cade Jameson, Andrew K. Jorgenson, Naomi Klein, Peter Linebaugh, Delores (Lola) Loustaunau, Andreas Malm, Philip Mancus, Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, Robert W. McChesney, Julius McGee, Istvn Mszros, Marcello Musto, Kamran Nayeri, Kari Norgaard, Frank Page, Marcel Paret, Mauricio Betancourt De La Parra, Thomas C. Patterson, David Pellow, Paul Prew, Camilla Royle, Kohei Saito, Ariel Salleh, Jean Philippe Sapinski, Keith Scott, Helena Sheehan, Eamonn Slater, Richard Smith, Christian Stache, Joanna Straughn, Stephen Tatum, Howard Waitzkin, Kyle Powys Whyte, Chris Williams, Ryan Wishart, and Christopher Wright.

Our ideas on ecology and society are inextricably interwoven with those of the two people with whom we share our lives on a daily basis, and without whose support and encouragement these pages would be blank. We therefore dedicate The Robbery of Nature, with deep humility, to our earthly muses, Carrie Ann Naumoff and Kris Shields.

Introduction

THE CHAPTER on Machinery and Large-Scale Industry in the first volume of Karl Marxs Capital closes with this statement: All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealththe soil and the worker. Robbing the worker referred to the theory of exploitation, which entailed the expropriation of the workers surplus labor by the capitalist. But what did Marx mean by robbing the soil? Here robbery was connected to his theory of the metabolic rift arising from the expropriation of the earth. As he stated earlier in the same paragraph, Capitalist production disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil.

The same basic logic was present in the other famous passage on the metabolic rift, at the end of the chapter on The Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent in the third volume of Capital. There Marx

In both instances, Marxs notion of the robbery of the soil is intrinsically connected to the rift in the metabolism between human beings and the earth. To get at the complexities of his metabolic rift theory, it is useful to look separately at the issues of the robbery and the rift, seeing these as separate moments in a single development. This is best done by examining how Marxs ecological critique in this area emerged in relation to the prior critique of industrial agriculture provided by the celebrated German chemist Justus von Liebig. Of particular importance in this context is Liebigs notion of the robbery system (